I Started Carrying Something Small Around Every Day. It's Changed Everything.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

As I'm heading out the door, I always make sure I have my keys, phone, sunglasses, and ear protection. City life is loud, and I like to have my active noise-canceling headphones for the train, as well as some more noise-filtering earplugs, which are more discreet in restaurants. I want to be able to control my sound environment—and it's never been easier.

I'm not alone either. Society is having a reckoning about noise. Hearing is a sense we can't physically turn off, and until recently, unless we were willing to cosplay as a construction worker by wearing ear defenders, we just had to suck it up. But as active noise-canceling technology goes from good to great, it's become easier than ever to protect our ears from dangerous sound levels. Noise blocking has gone from yellow foamies to glittering style accessories seen all over this year's Coachella . We've increasingly turned down the volume on the world—and our mental and physical health might depend on it.

Cities can be dangerously loud. Normal activities like taking a train or walking down the street put you at risk of hearing damage. The New York subway can break 100 decibels as express trains roar through Union Square, while hectic restaurants easily buzz at over 80 decibels, approaching the danger zone . We can safely listen to 80 decibels for up to 40 hours a week, according to the World Health Organization. But at 90 decibels, the safe exposure window drops to four hours, and by the time the volume exceeds 100 decibels, which is most concerts, we risk the beginnings of hearing loss after just 30 minutes. (That ringing in your ears after a show—that's a tiny bit of hearing damage.)

Noise isn't just bad for our ears. It can be harmful to the rest of our bodies, too, from our cardiovascular systems to our mental health . While we're early in our understanding of its impact on the nervous system, research from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, published earlier this year in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, found that “harms of noise increase the susceptibility to mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, suicide, and behavioral problems in children and adolescents.”

“There's definitely such a thing as listening fatigue,” Patricia Gaffney, president of the American Academy of Audiology and a professor at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, told Slate. “Whether it's listening to stuff for work, or a lot of noises in your environment, it can get tiring. To block out some of those sounds in your world is a mental health break that can help reduce that overall internal meter of annoyance and fatigue.”

Gaffney is pleased to see more people using ear protection. “Protecting your hearing up front is important for the long-term health of your ears and hearing over the lifespan,” said Gaffney. “I was recently at a really loud party at a local brewery, and it was nice to see the bartenders wearing earplugs. There was a woman there who had earmuffs on her baby. … People [increasingly] think about their hearing as an important part of their body that they need to protect.”

This is especially true as ear protection is getting better and less compromising. In July, the UK's Royal National Institute for Deaf People reported that a quarter of survey respondents were more willing to wear earplugs to concerts if sound quality wasn't impacted. And while 35 percent still don't plan to wear ear protection at their next live music event, the hearing-loss charity was optimistic about the direction of the trend.

The increased use of ANC headphones and earplugs is a mass experiment in doing something new to our bodies, which has led to questions about whether there could be a hidden cost to sound control. A now-debunked BBC story went viral earlier this year for suggesting headphone use could be the reason behind the rising diagnoses of auditory processing disorder, a condition where the brain struggles to interpret signals from the ears, while other articles have suggested it could lead to tinnitus. While acknowledging that we don't yet have any long-term data, Gaffney sees no reason to worry: “There isn't any evidence that we are creating a long-term problem.” The only exception is if someone uses earplugs around the clock, which can lead to trouble handling regular noise levels.

The biggest headphones-related risk is actually playing music or other content, such as podcasts or gaming, at too high a volume, which is exacerbated by the fact that we're wearing headphones for more hours a day. A study from Stanford University, published in 2023 in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, found 17 percent of US adolescents are showing signs of noise-induced hearing loss, primarily attributed to unsafe listening practices.

The normalization of filtering earplugs in social settings could potentially act as a correction. Companies like Vibes, Eargasm, Alpine, and Loop have sprung up to feed a new market of earplugs as useful fashion accessories—it's like sunglasses, but for ears.

“Before we started Loop, it was accepted that earplugs are not cool,” Maarten Bodewes, co-founder of Loop, told Slate. “You don't want to see them in your ears. We thought, you're going to see them anyway, so why not make something that looks almost like jewelry?” Loops were initially marketed to music lovers for concerts, but instead of focusing on preventing hearing damage, the plugs were sold as a way to safely have fun.

It was only when the pandemic hit and people stopped going out that Loop realized that customers were interested also for other reasons. “We [discovered] that people who were noise sensitive and neurodiverse were using them. Parents were a big use case, with kids being at home all day,” said Bodewes, adding people also slept in them.

The growing trend of tools that make noise optional has had the welcome side effect of making spaces more inclusive. Anyone can be noise sensitive, like those suffering from migraines, while auditory sensory differences are especially common with neurodiversity such as ADHD and autism.